There’s other LaTeX editors, LyX is quite limited – but works perfectly for scientific thesis, I kept it after the thesis I installed it for and am using it for the diploma thesis as well now. Honestly, I haven’t looked further after finding it good enough, I’m lazy like that

And thanks a lot for your comments!

Yes, LaTeX has been araound a long time, mostly in the acedemic and programing world: I have never had much interest in it. Still don’t, really – it’s the editors I’m looking at.

In the aircraft industry, I have worked with highly structured information all my life (from 10 pitch OCR-B daisywheel output to SGML manuals with >2Million hyperlinks), and FrameMaker does a pretty good job there. Far better tham MS Word etc. Which is why it is so popular in the industry.

However, no harm in checking out the alternatives now and then, especially since XML with HTML output are the name of the game now and are a long way from the paper distributions where every page had a different issue date on it. That is where FrameMaker really scored.

Anyhow, I don’t have anything to disagree with you about. It might be that LyX will be better (and cheaper) for my needs if it is easier to set up for SGML/XML. FrameMaker is quit onerous to set up.

I won’t be checking it out this week now though: I am currently converting completely inconsistent WordPerfect 5.x and 6.x docs to FrameMaker or Word via Open Office. In the document I have open at this moment, I have found 67 page headers – all the same. there were 9 different fonts called up none of them used. The one font that is used, is called up in almost every paragraph and in 120 cells of one table. It only needs to be there once at the begining of the document. These docs are so inconsistent that any form of atomatic translation is out of the question. Hence the interest in a low cost, but stable, editor that takes the formatting out of the hands of the author and lets them build content only. If you know of any others I can check out I’d be pleased to hear about them.

LaTeX isn’t exactly new by the way though It’s been around since 1980.

The thing about it not being able to download MiKTeX is exactly one of the problems I experienced as well by the way: It seems MiKTeX meanwhile moved (since the installation routine was programmed) and thus it’s not possible to install on-the-fly, and you have to download the entire LyX package that includes MiKTeX (link in the post).

Good luck, and let me know if it worked!

Oh, and FrameMaker has quite a different focus from LaTeX. Customizing the layout in LaTeX is pretty hard and can get very technical, it’s best used for stuff it was built to be used for – scientific publications – FrameMaker originally evolved partially as a way to showcase the great graphical possibilities of Sun workstations. As such, arguably LaTeX is structurally more rigid than the FrameMaker XML. Also, LaTeX enforces structure way more than FrameMaker does, because while FrameMaker was a graphical publishing package that had structure slapped on top in recent releases (starting 2002 it seems), LaTeX evolved from structure to a software package. Keep in mind that I have no clue and never actually worked with FrameMaker myself, but those differences in approach have to be kept in mind or you will be disappointed

I followed yr advice and everything works great. Thank you again.

I’ll certainly give them a try before I delve into the diploma thesis itself though, thanks!

I’m working on the paper at the office, so I’ll wait with downloading until tomorrow